BOLÍVAR AND ZAMORA REVOLUTIONARY CURRENT (CRBZ)
DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES
We are a sum of wills brought together by a great commitment, filled with passion for and love of the Bolivarian Revolution. We are, above all else, men, women, groups, organizations, and collectives, highly aware of the quota of responsibility that we bear in this historic moment of transformations and the arrival of the Patria Nueva, or New Homeland. We understand that Revolution is a question of making dreams into realities, and this is precisely the great challenge of the Bolivarian Revolution: make into a tangible reality the proposed historical and cultural project of our Revolutionary Program, the SIMON BOLIVAR NATIONAL PROJECT. This requires of us revolutionaries a conscious, creative and steady participation, since we understand each other as, and we take on the role of, those responsible for moving the Revolution forward, making Revolution alongside the People.
Filled with this spirit, this uncompromising commitment to the Patria (Homeland) and to the People – since the Homeland is the People – revolutionaries from across the country are coming together in a space that allows us to coordinate and unite efforts to transform into concrete deeds and actions both People’s Power and Bolivarian Socialism. This space allows us to push forward, from the grassroots, the most urgent tasks of the Revolution, to consolidate and deepen the Revolution in a way that allows for the building of a truly legitimate social and popular vanguard that accompanies the Commander President in the construction of the Sovereign, Decent, and Just Homeland, as outlined by Bolívar – in short, the Bolivarian Socialist Homeland.
THE BOLIVAR AND ZAMORA REVOLUTIONARY CURRENT: Is, above all else, a current made up of revolutionaries that intend to call together all revolutionaries that today find themselves dispersed in a diverse array of organizations. We seek to form a great popular torrent that empowers the People and makes it the subject and object of a process of liberation, as well as its own vanguard of the Bolivarian Revolution. As such, we affirm with great conviction that we don’t want to be the vanguard – we want the vanguard to be the People, organized. We want to deepen, and contribute to, the ideological debate – we want to contribute to the struggle against capitalist hegemony within social consciousness and contribute to the preparations necessary – given a situation created by plans of a counterrevolutionary, unpatriotic, and fascist right-wing that has given itself over to U.S. Empire. Yes, we want to help build a new revolutionary left in the country, a left that overcomes the culture of coffeehouses, of fragmentation, of localism, that understands the challenges and the dynamic of the revolutionary struggle of the 21st century and is founded in the historically revolutionary current that today engulfs Latin America: the current of Bolivarian Socialism. We also want to present our revolutionary praxis and ideological analyses in contrast to the reformists and opportunists that currently find themselves in formal levels of administration and who are incapable of translating into transformative action the thinking and revolutionary strategy of the Commander President.
The Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current is anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, humanist, and Christian. We are workers, students, homemakers, homosexuals, singers, young people, athletes, peasants, popular leaders. We are just like the People, and we are crazy in love with the homeland, with life, with nature, with the land, with peace, and we want to translate the strength of those feelings into concrete, transformative and liberating action.
WE ARE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF BOLÍVAR AND ZAMORA
By reclaiming Bolívar and Zamora as the banners and principal sources of our Revolutionary Current, we reclaim all the gestures and traditions of liberation, of equality, that they represent – and this is nourished by the profound traditions of struggle and equality of our People. As a reference for thinking and action, we reclaim with great strength the Tree of Three Roots. By doing so, we reclaim Simón Rodríguez, Guacaipuró, and the entire indigenous resistance against the Spanish invasion. We reclaim Sucre, Rivas, Urdaneta, Miranda, Argimiro Gabaldon, Fabricio Ojeda, and all the unknown and unnamed martyrs who have marched into sacrifice for the homeland and for the People.
Beginning with an understanding that overcoming capitalism is not just a question of understanding theoretical Marxism, we understand that we should delve into – and more importantly, recognize ourselves and find ourselves in – our profound roots, our history, our magical, plural, creative and liberating culture. It is in this culture that we will find the codes and the basis to build socialism at our pace. For this reason, when we say Bolívar and Zamora, we are saying that we are also the sons and daughters of the Pacha mama, of the water, of the sun.
Bolívar, the project, Bolívar the synthesis, the ethics, the lights, the morals, the fierce willingness to overcome difficulties, the historical tradition in which we all share as a people, Bolívar the horizon, the guiding light, the strategic objective.
Zamora, the affirmation of the people’s role as essential subjects in the construction of socialism.
Zamora the symbol of the excluded, betrayed a thousand times, the unbreakable willingness of the people to be free, Zamora the symbol of struggle against betrayal of revolutionary ideals.
With them we ratify our essence and our commitment. We seal our project, we acclaim our historical roots. With the example of Bolívar and Zamora we nourish ourselves so as to advance and build People’s Power.
WITH CHÁVEZ, HOMELAND OR DEATH
Our recognition of Commander Chávez’s Leadership and his decisive role in the current stage of the Revolution is something we take on from an objective point of view – totally divorced from any of the opportunisms so common these days. We understand that the particularity of his leadership is the result of his great capacities as a strategic guide, a tactician, his sharp political sense, and above all else, his immense love for the People and for humanity.
Commander Chávez, in the heat of the struggles and contradictions of this process, has known how to deepen his political thinking, nurturing it with a diverse array of ideological, humanist and revolutionary traditions, including the most beautiful of Latin American liberation thinking, especially Venezuelan sources. Commander Chávez incarnates and personifies the historical Cultural Project of the Bolivarian Revolution in part because of his talent, clarity, capacity to sacrifice and to work, because of his elevated ethics and morale. To deny this is to lack an objective reading of reality, not understand the particularities and the dynamics of this process.
In the current period, the leadership of Commander Chávez is the only guarantee for the advance and continuation of the Revolution, and what’s more is that this is nothing new in the history of humanity, in the history of revolutions, in the history of the struggles of the Peoples. Bolívar and his brilliance guaranteed the triumph over the Spanish empire. Lenin played a defining role in the victory of the revolution of October. Fidel and his charisma, his quality as a strategic guide, and his political capacity, led the Cuban people to victory.
When we call ourselves Chavistas we are calling ourselves militants of a revolutionary way of thinking, of an historical project incarnated by an historical leader that has proved himself up to the historical moment and who is willing to change the course of our people’s history, a history of 500 years plagued by exclusion, misery, plunder, and above all, treason. For these reasons, the Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current is profoundly Chavista, which for all intensive purposes is the same as saying Bolivarian Socialist.
FOR PEOPLE’S POWER, THE BASIS OF BOLIVARIAN SOCIALISM
A revolution is true and has historical perspective if, and only if, the people are empowered and take the reins of the redemption process. This is only possible when People’s Power is built, understanding it to be a relationship among equals that join forces in the most primary of spaces so as to build new social relations, endowing their organizations with the political, economic, military, cultural and judicial elements that allows for self-governance.
The building of People’s Power is complex work, less easy than taking the sky by storm or taking power – understanding power as an object. It’s about weaving consciences, going about configuring new relations of power in a laborious and slow organizing effort – it’s about sowing the seeds of socialism in each individual and in each political space and territory that belong to the People. It’s about cementing, little by little, revolutionary hegemony. It’s also about destroying the backbone of the capitalist model, its anti-values and its individualist culture. This requires a great deal of patience and conviction because it responds to a different logic, to another perspective on power, distinct from those known to date on both the left and the right. We take on, with the passion of lovers, People’s Power and the daily efforts to go about germinating and cultivating it in the heart of the People.
We understand People’s Power as the transversal axis of the Revolutionary Project, as the alpha and omega of all transformations, as the primary source for the construction of the new Socialist State that substitutes the still alive Bourgeois State.
The Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current takes on the impulse of the Communal Councils, the Socialists Communes, and the Communal Cities, as experiments, models and a way of building People’s Power within the Bolivarian Revolution.
THE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR NATIONAL PROJECT, REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM
THE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR NATIONAL PPROJECT is the analysis, the programmatic framework, and the strategy of the Bolivarian Revolution for the current period of transition towards Bolivarian Socialism. It synthesizes the project of a nation that is sovereign, free, and democratic, a project that was delineated by the Liberator in the search for a government eminently just, eminently ethical, eminently democratic, and capable of guaranteeing the most amount of happiness for the most amounts of people.
THE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR NATIONAL PROJECT is also a plan for revolutionary action, a map for navigating that should lead us to create the technical, material and spiritual conditions to build the new homeland. Therefore, unity around these guidelines and the leadership of Commander Chávez, in all levels of government and of political action, is fundamental. As revolutionaries, we can not propose for ourselves a strategy of struggle unaligned from the pragmatic and strategic framework.
THE SIMÓN BOLÍVAR NATIONAL PROJECT is an integrated, realistic and feasible revolutionary outlook for advancing towards Bolivarian Socialism. These are the elements that lead us to define the project as the revolutionary program for the current period and, as a result, we commit ourselves in every moment and in every space of our revolutionary action to impulse and enrich it with the most revolutionary content.
THE PSUV, FOR A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
With respect to the PSUV, our efforts are yet to come. We want to make it into a formidable ideological, political and organizational instrument up to the challenge of the moment being lived by class struggle. A vanguard party, profoundly ethical, classist (that is to say, a party that is the political representation of Poor People, a party whose core has room to incorporate middle class sectors, but only as allies and not as a leading force). A Party intertwined with the common person, a Party that emerges from the diversity of our geographical, social and spiritual territories. A PSUV capable of shining light as much on the small and daily challenges as on the large, geopolitical and geostrategic problems that we face in the struggle for national liberation and socialism. A Party that is nourished by the thousands of natural leaders that emerge in every corner of our homeland, a Party that creates the space for protagonism on the part of social movements, manual and intellectual workers, peasants, students, and artists. A Party that banishes from its worldview bureaucratism, paternalism, assistance-ism, and the old culture of clientelism.
A Party that the average people feel is their own, which is the only way of avoiding the displacement from people’s reach, borders, and feelings. When the bonds become affectionate, when passion and reason meet, they tend towards loyalty in those who love, in those who feel the utopia and rationality as a necessary part of their surroundings – only then do we break the evil proclamation of capitalism, its manifesto of being with whoever has the rostrum of the moment, with the victor or the owner of success.
THE BATTLE OF IDEAS
The battle of ideas – for the Bolívar y Zamora Revolutionary Current – is the unwavering struggle to win the hearts and minds of our countrymen and countrywomen; it’s the most decisive battlefield in which Venezuelan revolutionaries will have to combat in order to secure the Bolivarian dream. This is no simple issue, given the context of a consumption pattern based on the “new rent-based socialism” inherited from the fourth republic’s oil income, and massively reproduced by the state bureaucracy and formal institutionality. Within this context, the urban and rural poor – though they have been the principal beneficiaries of the new distribution of wealth – have yet to dominate the sphere of political decision-making and for one sole reason: the “old doesn’t finish dying and the new doesn’t finish being born.” Our new bureaucrats are the old spoiled children of the “fourth republic” who implement within their ministries and areas of influence the models and customs they learned in the past.
The means of ideological reproduction of the bourgeoisie play alone in the soccer field (means of communication, churches, schools and education institutions, universities, etc.) since the governmental instances dedicated to this work – even after 11 years of the Bolivarian Revolution – are incapable of setting the code, the revolutionary symbolism, that confronts and defeats the counterrevolution.
It is historically proven that the bourgeoisie does not give up its privileges voluntarily. Never has this class opted for voluntary suicide, instead, it defends its privileges tooth and nail. We have a long and complex conflict in this area, and to win, we should develop an effective counter-hegemonic strategy that from a popular and revolutionary perspective contributes to the transformation of the social consciousness – a consciousness that today is profoundly permeated by capitalism’s ideas and value systems. The ideological literacy of the masses, the cultural work, the consolidation of ethical governments, the construction of systems of popular information – all from the communes and communal cities – are tasks that we take on as lines of action, as part of our strategy to wage a battle that is fought without rifles, though it remains the most decisive of all battles of the Revolution.
WORKING WITH THE BASE, OUR FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE
The Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current takes on, as our fundamental principle, working with the base, working side by side with the People in the search to activate this base as fundamental subject in the struggle. This is born of an essential conviction that we embrace, and that we should always embrace: it is not the vanguard that saves the people, nor does making the Revolution correspond to a vanguard. The Revolution that we believe in is a Revolution in which the people lead. We work to materialize guiding slogans such as “Only the People can Save the People”, adding that for this to occur it is necessary to be organized, conscious, mobilized, and empowered. This can only be achieved by a permanent, systematic work with the base, leaving the coffeehouses and the principled slogan-isms, and merging with the people in concrete and real actions.
As such, working with the base is the axis of our strategy of struggle. We understand working with the base as the permanent, daily and systematic process of organizing, educating and mobilizing the People from their most primary social and territorial space. Working with the base should be done in concrete spaces such as Communal Councils, Communes and Communal Cities, the PSUV Battalions, and the National Bolivarian Militia, so that the people are empowered within the revolutionary spaces. For this reason, we propose to impulse working in the base from three fundamental lines of action, each of which is interconnected to the other: 1) organizational; 2) revindicational; and 3) educational.
GENDER EQUALITY, A REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE
For the Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current the consolidation of Bolivarian Socialism presupposes the taking on and practicing of a focus on gender that revindicates equality among genders, that liberates women from male chauvinism imposed by a society divided up into classes – especially in capitalist society – and that returns to human beings, man or woman, the right to define their sexuality freely and responsibly within a framework and non-discriminatory environment of respect. We struggle to banish from society all types of discrimination, of exclusion and exploitation. As such, we have a clear commitment to secure equality for women – overcoming her marginalization and oppression – and secure respect for homosexuals and the recognition of their right to choose their sexual option and live in liberty as full human beings.
NATIONAL BOLIVARIAN MILITIA, ARMED PEOPLE’S POWER
The National Bolivarian Militia that the Revolutionary Government is propelling forward represents a vital step in the security and defense of the Revolution as it incorporates the People in a concrete way into the tasks of preparing and organizing a defense system capable of confronting all threats to our national sovereignty, especially the threat posed by North American imperialism. In addition, it represents a tool that permits the outfitting of the construction of People’s Power with one of its elemental components: the armed element, that is to say, the element of the People developing its capacity of self-defense within, of course, a system that falls under the leadership of the Revolutionary State.
From the Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current we propose not only our own propulsion and activation as militiamen, militiawomen, but also the formulation of proposals that ensure the National Bolivarian Militia has both popular and revolutionary characteristics, so that it becomes an effective tool for the deepening and defense of Bolivarian Socialism and does not remain a simple formality.
PLATFORM OF STRUGGLE OF THE BOLÍVAR AND ZAMORA REVOLUTIONARY CURRENT
Convinced as we are that the Bolivarian Revolutionary Process demands the historical irruption of a revolutionary current capable of translating into acts the great tasks of the Bolivarian Revolution, a current that is endowed with the firmness and will to direct our homeland towards the path that breaks the mechanisms of capitalist domination and, at the same time, makes way and consolidates the basis of Bolivarian Socialism and its strategic objective of popular empowerment, the Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current proposes for itself the following platform of struggle:
1. The construction of the Bolívar and Zamora Revolutionary Current as a space for meeting and articulating so as to join dreams, wills, and desires to build homeland (Bolívar the project, Bolívar the synthesis, the ethics, the lights and morals, the iron will to overcome difficulties, the historical tradition in which we merge as a people, Bolívar the horizon, the lighthouse, the strategic objective; Zamora the revindication of the role played by the people as essential subject in the construction of socialism, Zamora the symbol of the excluded betrayed a thousand times, the unbreakable will of the people to be free, Zamora the symbol of struggle against betrayal of revolutionary struggle). We believe that the current should be built with a focus on networks, with organizational autonomy, having unity of purpose, unity of action, focused on the great revolutionary tasks of this period;
2. The impulse and materialization of the SIMÓN BOLÍVAR NATIONAL PROJECT and its seven strategic lines as a program for the revolutionary transition that allows us to establish the basis for a Socialist Venezuela and continue the rupture of capitalism’s process of domination, accelerating the process of National Liberation and Social Revolution;
3. The impulse and development of a Revolutionary Policy of Security and Defense that is based on the incorporation of the People in the organization and defense of the homeland as well as the development of the concept of War of National Resistance (national militia, civic-military unity) and a policy of cleaning out a state law enforcement that is infiltrated by drug-traffickers, paramilitaries, mafias, the mercenary practice of selected killings, and the acquired culture of Colombianization. At the same time, work should continue with efficiency to defeat poverty, one of the generating causes of public insecurity.
4. The Construction of People’s Power, having as focal point the communal councils, the conformation of communes, Productive Brigades, and the Socialist Companies. The essence of this revolution – for it to be possible and viable – is the empowerment of the masses, securing for the People the historical role played by the People and not allowing for the outsourcing of this role, not allowing for the supplanting of this role as is proposed by reformism and opportunism encrusted in some sectors of the government and parties within this process.
5. The wager on the development of the PSUV as the Party of the revolution is a historical necessity and an opportunity – from within, together with the efforts of other revolutionaries, we must prepare the basis to forge a revolutionary vanguard in this country (overcoming the current “leadership” that makes the process suffer), consolidating a vanguard that is up to the historical moment and up to the leadership of the Commander President Chávez.
6. Push the acceleration and construction of the Revolutionary State, which requires the conformation of a legal framework that transforms and places this new state in line with the historical moment. This requires a new superstructure – which has been advanced with the Enabling Laws and others – as well as a new way of distributing power that rests with the People, which would be the essence of the new state;
7. Take on the task of Organizing, Educating, and Mobilizing the People in this struggle to construct social consciousness, to construct revolutionary hegemony;
8. Struggle for Efficiency, Quality of Government and its Programs – since this translates into the maximum amount of happiness for the people – in Health, Housing, Education, among others;
9. Take on the acceleration of the Transformation of the Educational System to go about constructing the socialist citizen;
10. Accelerate the scientific and technical Revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrialization of the country;
11. The War on Large Estates as a mechanism to break-up the remains of the feudal-capitalist model of domination of production of the poor and peasant people;
12. The struggle to the death against Corruption and Bureaucracy;
13. This crusade (Number 12) should be propelled from two fundamental aspects of the state and society. First, from the political-social aspect, whose fundamental task lies in the hands of the people and their social intelligence networks that serve to identify, locate and denounce these ills as well as their material and intellectual authors. Second, from the institutional aspect, in this new phase impunity must be abolished and tribunals must be put into place that are fiscally specialized in an extraordinary manner within a framework that guarantees results. Corruption must be declared a crime against the country, giving the anti-corruption law constitutionality, and at the same time a code of ethics for the public servant must be enacted, strengthening campaigns of public sensitization in these subjects. The process for reducing bureaucracy must be simplified, as should the increase in efficiency and effectiveness in public administration;
14. The Institutionalization of Revolutionary Morals and Ethics, a Code of Ethics, School of the Public Servant, and the punishment in an exemplary manner corruption;
15. Level and make more humble salaries of public servants. No public servant can make more than our Comrade President.